


Silver tigers in the moonlight, running

by sprx77



Category: Naruto, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: An excerpt from the verse, In which Obito is Blue and everyone else is obvious, M/M, The Naruto Raven Cycle AU ive been promising, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 16:09:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8923669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprx77/pseuds/sprx77
Summary: Madara and Tobirama for the "cuddling for warmth" prompt. The Raven Cycle AU.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LordOfTheNargles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LordOfTheNargles/gifts).



Madara’s breath fans out, hot and visible. He breathes in frigid air and pushes it slowly out of his nose. Like smoke, it curls up. Like he’s a dragon, almost; irritable and with fire curled ready in his gut. Or his lungs?

He certainly inhales enough smoke.

He is, Tobirama notes, mythical enough to qualify. Magical enough. In his head, he tries for scathing or dry and fails. Even the thought’s tone shifts to faintly reverent.

He can never, ever, compliment Madara aloud. Tobirama chews his lip, chapped from the cold, and leans his head back with a sigh. It touches metal cold enough to feel through his hair. It spills out white against the grey door of the crappy car Touka had pawned off on him, all razor smiles and sharp insistence.

It’s a crappy car, but it’s _his_ crappy car, and he loves it as much as he hates the charity.

Just as, despite having known her so briefly, he loves Touka as much as he hates that he can’t claim her properly. Blood; they have the same blood, the same nose, the same father and grandfather and everything before. It wouldn’t have hurt, probably– and this thought does manage to be cynical and dry– if he hadn’t fallen in love with her in a matter of minutes.

What would life had been like with fierce Touka as a childhood playmate instead of a marked lack of any? Of doting parents instead of dotted bruises, black and blue against snow-white skin?

White hair against white skin against the grey metal of an old Toyota, broken down on the side of the road. His eyes, red. The skin of his knuckles, pink-red from the chill. White in the air from his breath; white, the snow outside, white: the skin he by turns hates and viciously, spitefully loves.

The albino bastard that no one wants.

Well.

He cracks an eye open.

Madara is looking out the window. They have long since climbed into the backseat for the long wait. Hashirama, called on Madara’s cell phone, would be on his way as soon as possible. In this snow, this far out of town, it would be a while.

Tobirama had no doubt Hashirama would come. His brother– and oh, how it felt to think such, freedom to do so like a blooming flower unfurling in his thoughts, a secret, a secret, a secret spilling free where no one could take it from him or use it to hurt him–

A secret that wasn’t one, really, because Hashirama set his jaw and called him brother without flinching, without remorse, claims Tobirama as openly and steadfastly as Tobirama claims Touka in his heart, kin and kin and kin and _kin_ –

His brother is like a force of nature. Like the Konoha beneath Tobirama’s skin. Like the Konoha Madara dreamed up, which he still can’t quite bend his mind around. It’s true, he knows. The truth of it sings under his bones, branches tied to Konoha’s trees. _Your eyes, your hands,_ he’d bargained.

The forest already had a god.

It had gained a magician.

Now all it needs is a king.

Hashirama would come for them, because nothing could stop Hashirama in any matter, but until then–

“What’re you staring at?” Madara asks, drawn up and defensive. His chin is firmly to the left.

Tobirama huffs, ignoring the cloud his breath makes. He wishes for thicker clothes. He wishes for a lot of things, sometimes.

He only has to be careful Konoha doesn’t give them to him.

“Take a nap.” Tobirama orders, half-serious. He reaches out with a ragged-shoe’d foot and taps Madara’s leg, cloaked in black. “Dream us up a magic space-heater.”

Madara’s turn to huff.

He tilts his head back against the window.

“‘S not so easy,” He admits, grudging. And, like an afterthought, so many moments later Tobirama has almost gotten lost in his own head again: “Too cold to sleep.”

It’s cold enough that Tobirama has stopped shivering. His hand clutches his coat.

He’s not going to freeze to death on the side of the road, half a mile from a mystic dream forest. He’s not going to die, because Hashirama is coming for him, and even if he wasn’t he is self-reliant. Self-sufficient. 

He can get out of the car right now and walk home.

Tobirama can get out of the car right now and walk back to Konoha, let the seasons change. Time isn’t real in Konoha. He could be warmer. He could be–

Warmth.

Sudden warmth, and Tobirama’s eyes shoot open.

He’s covered in a sturdy leather jacket, warm from body-heat. It feels blessed, divine in the freezing husk of the car. Across from him, Madara is in a white uniform shirt. Without a tie, of course. The Academy would implode if Madara ever wore a tie to class.

He is looking resolutely out of the window. Red dusts his cheeks.

The sleeves are casually torn off, a display of casual affluence that would normally make Tobirama’s mood drop to frosty levels, but. Well. All the frost in him is across the Toyota’s windshield. There’s no room for extra ice inside the cab.

Besides, it’s the kind of thing Tobirama can understand. It’s not done for the bad boy aesthetic. Madara does so little to maintain it, more crooked grin and asshole jokes when he does the cliche delinquent things.

No, Madara’s real danger comes from when he’s seeking it out. His features are surprisingly soft for someone so cutting, so derisive. He inhales smoke and breathes out fire, burns those closest to him without trying.

He lives for the burn, sometimes, lives to set things on fire and drive 200 miles per hour on windy streets. It’s how he feels alive. Tobirama knows this from whispered conversations late at night, halting words with halting stories, low admittance and unconcerned, dismissive remarks that have Tobirama clutching sheets and Madara’s forearms while the secrets curl like ashes between them. Diaries of the spoken word, journals of feelings better left unwritten. 

 _Burn, burn_ , Tobirama often thinks, as they exchange stilted truths built from emotions too dark to indulge, under the cover of his bedroom’s soft darkness. Pages and pages of unstable thoughts go up in flames with each tattered conversation, broken up with barked laughter and hushed sarcasm, fatalistic humor and stiff, defensive muscles losing tension for the first time since the last time they stayed up until morning filling the night’s accusing silence with bold comradery and long swatches of easy, companionable quiet.

Tobirama feels trapped in his own skin often enough to understand how Madara might resent the impeding of his movements. Might rip the fabric and tug it off jerkily, furiously, needing to be free of it. Freedom means more to Madara than the others.

He feels trapped in this town. That one _wasn’t_ told to Tobirama, a confession in bullshit casual tones while Hashirama stared eagerly at his maps; that one he had guessed, put together by the grimaces and the arson and the constantly skipping classes. He loves the huge studio apartment, hates that he has to live there, go to school, play a part he never asked for.

It’s a part that’s all Tobirama has ever asked for.

“Thanks.” He says, and means it. He can’t feel his toes.

“Don’t mention it.” Gruff, but not with embarrassment. Okay, with embarrassment. But the words carry the hint of seriousness. A suggestion of it, at least, without it being actually present. ‘ _Don’t mention it_ ’, like a plea, a demand even with pink-tinged cheekbones; ‘ _let me do this without calling me out on it, you cunt_ ’ is what Tobirama knows he’s really saying.

Because Tobirama is the freakish albino bastard child that no one wants, forcing his way into the Academy, forcing his way into the life he wants, forcing the world to let him live.

Madara’s the only thing he’s never had to force.

Madara is the only exception to the rule.

 _I’ve never been wanted,_ Tobirama thinks, lashes like snow on his cheeks.

Not really. 

Madara started it, and since then it’s built up like an avalanche.

Madara, then Hashirama. Kakashi. Obito. Touka.

Obito’s family of crazy women, Uzumaki and snakes and magic all in one crazy house. Orochimaru and the crazy mercenary they fell in love with, Sakumo.

Madara doesn’t want anything from him. No, that’s incorrect. Madara wants everything from him, supposedly, but doesn’t want him enough to act on it.

No, that’s illogical. Madara wants him, all of him, and for all his prickliness and confidence won’t act to _have_ him. Or to push it. Madara is the pushiest asshole in all other aspects of life, but not this.

Never this, apparently.

It’s oddly touching. Tobirama probably wouldn’t know at all if it wasn’t so obvious, if Madara didn’t care quite enough to hide it. If they didn’t have stupid moments and stupid smiles that lasted too long, stupid lingering glances. Stupid fights and stupid Madara, shoving open doors and throwing himself onto beds.

Madara, dreaming up magic sunglasses for him because Tobirama’s eyes are sensitive in regular light, let alone the blinding sun reflected on the snow blanketing fucking everything.

Madara, beautiful and dangerous, orbiting Tobirama like a star but doing it casually, effortlessly, like it’s not a big deal. Like it’s the way things are, the way of the universe. Like it’s irrevocable.

The space between them when they’re alone always feels the opposite of charged. There’s no static, no urge to act. It’s not electric. Gravity acts up between them.

Tobirama has always felt the pull.

Black moons curl around Madara’s bicep, cutting edges and inky shapes. The tattoo he could have dreamed up but didn’t. It moves around slightly as Tobirama shifts around the backseat, catching hooks on tanned skin.

He moves from his end of the seat to Madara’s, jacket with him. It trails over the old cloth cushions. 

Madara’s eyes are closed. 

It gives a delicate, almost fragile air to his features.

Tobirama’s breath catches, obvious in the quiet.

He is not used to thinking of Madara as vulnerable.

He’s not sure anyone else has ever had the opportunity to think as much.

Madara doesn’t open his eyes as Tobirama lays a hand on his knee, forcibly unhesitant. His breath speeds up, though. It’s white-misted between them, the smell of smoke from his last cigarette crossing the distance as the distance lessens.

“Hush.” Tobirama says, and it comes out a bit broken. The bob of Madara’s adam’s apple is visible from this distance. The distance is smaller, then non-existent.

Tobirama lays his head on Madara’s chest and can’t ignore the way his breathing stops, nor the ragged quality to his own. The way his eyes are surely still closed, lips slightly parted. Tobirama balances the jacket over them both, lets their legs tangle.

For a moment, it’s warm and nobody breathes.

Finally, Madara lets out a breath of hot air against Tobirama’s hair. They have spent so much time making stupid jokes and enjoying stupid fights and being stupid assholes that this quiet, gentle newness is strange.

It’s what they both want, though.

Getting that is strange for both of them.

“I hate your piece of shit car, Snow White.” Madara grumbles.

Tobirama swiftly jabs fingertips to his kidneys, enjoying immensely the _ooof_ he gets in response.

“ _Christ!_ ” Madara exclaims, blasphemous and unrepentant. Tobirama feels vindicated, equilibrium restored, and smiles, hidden in Madara’s shirt.

Hashirama will come. 

Obito with his chicken’s nest hair will likely be with him, goggles, bright crochet clothes, attitude and all, sitting in the front seat of the Sedan.

His sunny grin will fade into a tortured expression as the Murder Squash song blares from the speakers as soon as Madara snaps his fingers. Kakashi, as pale and white-haired as Tobirama, will appear to scare the living shit out of them.

Maybe, just maybe, Tobirama will hold Madara’s hand in the back seat, this new and soft closeness between them following them into the real world. Maybe it’ll unfurl like a new leaf in the sun into something beautiful.

For now, Tobirama is warm.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to prompt me @ definitelynotaminion.tumblr.com!


End file.
